Google Permanently Bans 200 "Fake News" Sites
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In a visit this link blog post by Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads, posted on Wednesday, Google said it has banned 200 publishers from accessing its Adsense advertising service for posting fake news stories. Google said it had cracked down on sites which contained 1) Ads for illegal products; 2) Misleading ads; 3) Bad ads on mobile; 4) Ads trying to game the system and, 5) Promoting and profiting from bad sites. But the emphasis was on the so-called "fake news" category which has dominated media buzz for the past two months.
This is how Spencer explained his action:
In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.
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We've had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.
Google has faced criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.
This is how Spencer explained his action:
In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.
* * *
We've had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.
Google has faced criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.
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From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations. We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.
In total, Google took down 1.7 billion ads that they found in violation of their policies in 2016, more than double the 780 million they removed in 2015.
It wasn't just fake news: Google provided the following examples of common policy violations among bad sites in 2016:We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.
Some of the more conventional bans were the result of Google adding a policy mid-year prohibiting ads for payday loans, considered predatory. Roughly five million payday loan ads were disabled over the latter six months of 2016. Also among those the removed ads were what Google calls “tabloid cloakers.”
These advertisers run what look like links to news headlines, but when the user clicks, an ad for a product such as a weight loss supplement pops up. Google suspended 1,300 accounts engaged in tabloid cloaking in 2016.
Spencer concludes:In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.
Google has not disclosed the list of 200 sites it had permanently banned.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-25/google-permanently-bans-200-fake-news-sites -
Wonder if this will prevent all these wack threads
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More sites will pop up to replace them with a quickness. Gullible followers will believe anything as long as it's filled with gloom and doom.
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Will satire sites be affected?
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How come Snopes wasn't shut down?
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Word i might finally stop having to see those "look at precious now after losing 200lbs" ads now smh
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fox news , Alex Jones , Limbaugh and Breitbart gatta go too.
im waiting for facebook to do something. -
Glad about the ads but I don't like that Google are decidin' what is and isn't 'fake' news. It's not Google's fault people read ? and then don't use the search engine that the idiot is already on to fact check
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CeLLaR-DooR wrote: »Glad about the ads but I don't like that Google are decidin' what is and isn't 'fake' news. It's not Google's fault people read ? and then don't use the search engine that the idiot is already on to fact check
This!!! -
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CeLLaR-DooR wrote: »Glad about the ads but I don't like that Google are decidin' what is and isn't 'fake' news. It's not Google's fault people read ? and then don't use the search engine that the idiot is already on to fact check
My sentiments exactly. Google has the right to do whatever it wants, but I can't cosign this. It's a dangerous slippery slope, imo, and it basically amounts to censorship, which I generally don't support. People, i.e. grown-ass adults, should decide what is fake or not and what they want to see and what they don't want to see. We're not that dumb. And if we are, we should be free to be so without being treated like children, which is unfortunately a big trend.
Who decides what's fake news anyway? And why has this "fake news" trend suddenly become so popular now? We've had fake news for quite some time now, and most of it is mainstream news, television and newspaper. Looks like another method of control to me. And people are eating it up. -
CeLLaR-DooR wrote: »Glad about the ads but I don't like that Google are decidin' what is and isn't 'fake' news. It's not Google's fault people read ? and then don't use the search engine that the idiot is already on to fact check
My sentiments exactly. Google has the right to do whatever it wants, but I can't cosign this. It's a dangerous slippery slope, imo, and it basically amounts to censorship, which I generally don't support. People, i.e. grown-ass adults, should decide what is fake or not and what they want to see and what they don't want to see. We're not that dumb. And if we are, we should be free to be so without being treated like children, which is unfortunately a big trend.
Who decides what's fake news anyway? And why has this "fake news" trend suddenly become so popular now? We've had fake news for quite some time now, and most of it is mainstream news, television and newspaper. Looks like another method of control to me. And people are eating it up.
Damn good post!!! -
CeLLaR-DooR wrote: »Glad about the ads but I don't like that Google are decidin' what is and isn't 'fake' news. It's not Google's fault people read ? and then don't use the search engine that the idiot is already on to fact check
My sentiments exactly. Google has the right to do whatever it wants, but I can't cosign this. It's a dangerous slippery slope, imo, and it basically amounts to censorship, which I generally don't support. People, i.e. grown-ass adults, should decide what is fake or not and what they want to see and what they don't want to see. We're not that dumb. And if we are, we should be free to be so without being treated like children, which is unfortunately a big trend.
Who decides what's fake news anyway? And why has this "fake news" trend suddenly become so popular now? We've had fake news for quite some time now, and most of it is mainstream news, television and newspaper. Looks like another method of control to me. And people are eating it up.
While I agree in sentiment... people have proven time and again that they are susceptible to messaging and propaganda and that's exactly what this fake news stuff is.
These idiots are out here trying to blow up pizza joints and ? - they can't be trusted to do their own research and come to logical conclusions based on facts and evidence.
? I wish they would permaban the bible, torah, koran, mediatakeout and all that other ? while they're at it since these fools' inability to discern fact from fiction is not only a danger to themselves but to everybody around them. -
Agree with Plutarch... Its a dangerous precedent for Google to be the gatekeeper on what's real and what's not...
Y'all think they got verify sources that are counterproductive to their bottom line?
Or just ban them, brush it under the rug and keep it pushing? -
Agree with Plutarch... Its a dangerous precedent for Google to be the gatekeeper on what's real and what's not...
Y'all think they got verify sources that are counterproductive to their bottom line?
Or just ban them, brush it under the rug and keep it pushing?
I'm pretty sure they just run analysis in the same way they do for spam, scam, domain squatter and phishing sites.
There will be plenty of ? news for people to find if that's what they're into but most likely the ones linked to known botnets or paid disseminators/content generators will be buried.
Google quietly bans/buries a lot of ? and this is no different. The fact that they only wiped out 200 of the zillion sites in their db should be an indicator that they're not just curating content all ? -nilly but actually targeting very specific circumstances.
